Frankenstory: Attack Of The Iranian Cyber Warriors

Citing no hard evidence, U.S. government officials have been stoking fears that the Iranians are out to get us.

Who Is Hacking U.S. Banks? 8 Facts

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Just in time for Halloween, there's a new bogeyman in town: the Iranian government-sponsored cyber attacker. As with other phantasms, related sightings are growing more numerous, though they remain unsubstantiated by hard evidence.

The appearance of this new and reportedly escalating threat comes after a recent lull that occurred thanks to the coordinated international law enforcement takedown of the LulzSec group and key members of the Anonymous hacktivist collective.

Despite the Anonymous takedowns, anonymity remains well in vogue. Start with U.S. government officials, who have been granting anonymous media interviews in which they assert that the Iranian government is behind the bank website disruptions as well as a series of wire-transfer attacks. In the latter case, the wire transfers -- aided by credential-grabbing malware and Zeus botnets--have let attackers transfer millions of dollars into overseas accounts.

Cue Iran as the culprit again for the Shamoon malware attack against the network of Saudi Aramco, which is the world's largest exporter of crude oil. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said earlier this month that the attacks against Saudi Aramco managed to "virtually destroy" 30,000 PCs. An internal Saudi Aramco investigation more recently revised that estimate to 50,000 PCs. According to an August blog post by Eugene Mayevski, CTO of security firm EldoS, Shamoon also included a copy of the company's commercial master boot record wiper, RawDisk, which he guessed had been stolen from one of the company's customers.

Many observers read Panetta's speech as a thinly veiled threat against Iran, made as a nuclear standoff with Iran becomes more likely. The U.S. government is also reportedly developing contingency plans for a strike against Iran -- not of the cyber variety -- as the country improves its uranium-enrichment capabilities.

On the cyber-attack front, however, where's the hard evidence that ties Iran to all of these attacks? Well, that's classified. Furthermore, at least in the case of Shamoon, this week anonymous government officials admitted to Bloomberg that the evidence is only circumstantial.

But the case against Iran may not even be that, as digital forensic investigators this week also confirmed earlier reports that -- counter to U.S. government officials' assertions -- Shamoon was an amateurish, copycat Flame attack, carried out by a single individual. Thanks to the individual having incorrectly configured the malware, it not only did less damage than intended, but it helped investigators trace the infection back to a USB stick that had been plugged into the employee's PC while he was logged in. Saudi authorities, according to news reports, have arrested a suspect.

Panetta continued to insist this week that the Shamoon malware had been "a very sophisticated tool." To be charitable, that may have been true five years ago, but the state of the art in malware has rapidly advanced since then.

What's fueling those rapid advances? Start with Stuxnet, Duqu, Flame, MiniFlame, or any other government forays into cyber weapons. "This is where I get nervous: Oh, great, a massive training ground for criminals and other groups -- here's how you build a massive command-and-control center for criminal attacks," said Eric Byres, CTO of Belden's Tofino Security, in a recent phone interview.

In other words, tomorrow's crimeware update will likely incorporate tricks developed by our own country's cyber weapons program. Like so many Frankenstein monsters, what comes for us in the digital dead of night bears a startling resemblance to something of our own making.

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Makes sense great marketing and hype for the holiday. You know for a minute I thought that there were groups of Muslim fundamentalists that were in huddled formations and set on attacking the US whenever possible, that's not true? I think that there is a big difference and the 2 should not be compared because the end results and goals are much different. I am referring to Anonymous, LulzSec to the like of Muslim fundamentalist groups there goals are completely different, meaning one is to inform the public while the other groups are set on destruction. I will let you guess which is which!

Published: 2015-03-31The build_index_from_tree function in index.py in Dulwich before 0.9.9 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a commit with a directory path starting with .git/, which is not properly handled when checking out a working tree.